Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-09-04-Speech-4-014"
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"en.20080904.4.4-014"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, Mrs Ries, ladies and gentlemen, European citizens in every country are quite legitimately worried about the quality of the environment and are increasingly concerned about the link between the environment and health.
The Environment Ministers had an opportunity to deal with this issue last December and the Council is now attaching increasing importance to this matter. Different pathologies are involved here, and while these are numerous, the facts and the links between pollution and health have still not been properly established. What we are referring to here are respiratory diseases, asthma, allergies, cancer and endocrine disruptors, especially those that affect the most vulnerable sections of the population, as Mrs Ries has already pointed out, including children, pregnant women, the elderly and the disadvantaged.
The European Union’s new strategy to promote sustainable development, as adopted by our heads of state or government in June 2006, quite rightly includes public health as one of the key challenges we face, the aim being to promote health without discrimination and to improve protection against the health risks that are now being posed, and all this has to be achieved – and I will come back to this – by means of robust preventive measures.
There are several ways of improving the current situation, and all have been mentioned. There is better cooperation between the health sector and the environment sector, which unfortunately sometimes tend to develop in separate directions. There is the need to improve the quality of the environment, and that is what we are doing, especially with our work on the IPPC Directive and the proposal for a directive on soil quality, which we shall speak about presently, as well as the need currently facing us to improve Community expertise in this area. There is the work that we are all doing together at international level, and especially within the World Health Organisation. Finally, there is the objective that we are pursuing in a very hands-on way, which is to improve the manner in which environment is incorporated into every relevant policy, plan and programme, and especially in the course of the health and environment programme that is to run from 2004 to 2010. In short, it is important to bring this mid-term review to a successful conclusion so as to ensure that the actions taken are as effective as possible.
Like Mrs Ries, I in turn would like to stress the need for preventive measures in all the different fields of action, and in all the points that have been mentioned in your work.
The Council in its conclusions of last December, just like Parliament today, takes the view that action is needed as soon as possible. We have to act quickly and we have to act ahead of events. We need to act according to the principles of prevention and according to the principles of precaution, which certainly means developing new tools capable of anticipating and analysing potential threats as soon as they appear or as soon as any suspicion arises, and then being able to view these various problems against a different background, such as that of climate change or biosecurity, for example, which are both areas that are connected with human health."@en1
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